The Giannakis Bride (14 page)

Hermione’s mouth trembled and her hand fell away from Brianna’s arm. “You make me ashamed,” she quavered. “I wish I had your fortitude. But my husband—”

“Is a bully, Mrs.
Poulos
, and he gets away with it because you let him,” Brianna replied bluntly. “Why don’t you try standing up to him, for a change? You’d be surprised how much it would boost your confidence, not to mention your self-esteem. Who knows, it might even earn the respect of the son you claim to love so devotedly.”

“It isn’t easy.”

“Not many things worth having ever are. It all boils down to how hard you’re willing to fight for them. And now, if you’ll excuse me,
Dimitrios
is waiting to take me home.”

“You were in the ladies’ room a long time,” he remarked, as they headed back along the road to the villa. “I was beginning to think you were being held hostage.”

“In a way I was. Your mother cornered me.”

He stiffened, his hands suddenly gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. “I’m surprised my father risked letting her off her leash and out of his sight. What did she want?”

“To know how Poppy is.”

“I hope you told her to mind her own business.”

“I couldn’t do that,
Dimitrios
. She was so upset and seemed genuinely worried. But I did suggest she could always visit Poppy and see for herself how she’s doing.”

At that, he hit the brakes with such force that the car nearly skidded off the road. “You did what?”

“I told her, if she was all that interested, she should go to the clinic and find out for herself.”

“You had no right, Brianna!” he said, his words a whiplash of contained fury. “No right at all to interfere in something that’s none of your concern.”

“I thought Poppy was my concern,” she shot back. “That by volunteering to donate bone marrow, I’d earned the right to make her my concern.”

“One thing’s got nothing to do with the other. I decide who gets to spend time with my daughter, not you.”

“I see.” She swallowed painfully, her throat so thick suddenly, it almost choked her.

“No, you don’t,” he snapped, stepping on the accelerator again and racing the last few hundred yards to the gates of his estate. “You don’t have the first idea what’s really going on here.”

“Why don’t you enlighten me, then,
Dimitrios
? Or does my being a model make me such an airhead that I couldn’t possibly understand the intricate workings of your superior mind?”

He slammed on the brakes a second time and killed the engine. In the beat of silence that followed, she heard a gust of frustration escape his lips as he wrestled with his inner demons. Then, his anger at last subsiding, he turned to her in the moonlight and stroked a conciliatory hand down her cheek. “It’s complicated, Brianna, okay? Let’s just leave it at that. Look, we’re home and it’s a beautiful night. Don’t let what happened at the club spoil things. Let’s forget about my parents and take a walk on the beach, and talk about our wedding and the future.”

All around them, huge urns of fresh flowers glowed like stars in the moonlight, ready for tomorrow’s garden party. A striped tent stood on the far lawn. Chairs
swagged
in white linen clustered around small tables with floral centerpieces. Stephanotis and gardenias scented the air.

No question but that the setting was perfect. The Garden of Eden recreated to
Dimitrios
Giannakis’s
exacting standards, with not a petal out of place, and him its benevolent god, willing to dispense forgiveness for her sins with a touch of his almighty hand!

Bleak with misery and disappointment, she flinched away from him. Did he really believe a walk on the beach would erase what had just taken place between them?

“What future?” she asked bitterly. “The one in which you issue the orders and I meekly obey them? No thanks,
Dimitrios
, I’m not that desperate for a husband! You can sneer at your father all you like, but the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and underneath the charmingly civilized veneer you present to the rest of the world, you’re exactly as manipulative and domineering as he is.”

He started to reply, but she’d heard enough. Flinging open the door, she climbed out of the car and left him without a backward glance.

Erika met her at the front door. “You’re crying, Brianna!” she exclaimed, a rare note of solicitude coloring her words. “Why? What’s happened?”

“Ask your boss,” she wailed, furious at her own weakness. “He’s the one with all the answers.”

“Is it Poppy?”

She shook her head and swiped at the accursed tears streaming from her eyes. “No, it’s not Poppy.”

“A lover’s quarrel, then. I could see the pair of you were falling in love.” Almost fondly, Erika cradled Brianna’s chin in her work-worn hand. “They happen, but the making up is all the sweeter for it. The two of you will work it out, you’ll see.”

Overwrought, Brianna sobbed, “When did you suddenly decide you were on my side, Erika? I’m trouble, just like my sister, remember?”

“I have second sight,” the old woman replied sagely. “I see more than appears on the surface.
Dimitrios
is right. You look like her, but there the resemblance ends. Dry your tears,
pethi
mou
, and I’ll make you some
tsai
apo
votana
—some herbal tea to soothe your nerves. You’re exhausted. Anyone would be in such trying times. You should get some rest. Everything will look quite different after a good night’s sleep. Off you go now, before
Dimitrios
comes in and sees your pretty eyes all red and swollen.”

But it would take more than well-meant home remedies to bridge the differences between her and
Dimitrios
, Brianna knew. Too pent-up to sit passively in her room, she paced the floor like a caged animal and finally, in desperation, flung off her clothes and climbed into her bathing suit.

Except for the distant murmur of voices in the kitchen wing, the house was quiet. Making her way downstairs, she slipped through the French doors leading to the rear terrace, and ran silent as a shadow along the path to the pool deck.

The moon had slipped behind the trees, but underwater lights turned the water into a swath of turquoise satin. Dropping her towel on a chaise, she plunged cleanly into the limpid depths and began a punishing crawl up and down the twenty-meter length.

Her thoughts kept pace with every stroke.

She’d have to move out of his house. First thing tomorrow, she’d pack up her stuff. Find a hotel close to the clinic. Visit Poppy when she knew he wouldn’t be there, because she couldn’t stand seeing him every day.

What a good thing he’d shown his true colors before it was too late. That he could invite her into his life one minute, then slam the door in her face the next, defied rational explanation.

But that he could speak to her so brutally…be so unfeeling toward the woman who’d given birth to him…!

Oh, he was horrible! She was so well rid of him!

In all fairness, though, she had to shoulder some of the blame. She’d broken every promise she’d made to herself not to get involved with him again. Not to rush blindly into any arrangement that might compromise her hard-won peace of mind and heart.

Yet within a week, she’d agreed to marry him, a man with whom she’d spent little more than thirty days total, and most of those occurring years ago. He was a stranger, someone given to half truths and secrets. What else hadn’t he told her? He could be a wife beater, for all she really knew. Be hiding a criminal past behind his exquisitely tailored suits and handmade leather shoes.

She was too willing to be dazzled by illusions of romance. Too easily taken in by appearances. Show her a pair of dark, Mediterranean eyes, a smile that could, when it chose, reduce tempered steel to a molten mass, and the body of a Greek god, and she was lost. A helpless heap of female hormone-driven need.

She shouldn’t be allowed to roam free without a keeper.

She was a fool.

He was a liar. He’d deliberately misled her.

And she had finally run out of energy. Her body ached, her lungs were bursting, her pulse racing, and her arms leaden weights she could barely lift. Depleted, she rolled over on her back, closed her eyes, and floated to the ladder hanging over the side of the deep end of the pool. Wearily, she grasped a rung, hauled herself onto the deck and made her way to the chaise where she’d left her towel.

As she bent to pick it up, a tall figure strolled out from the black shadow cast by a nearby palm tree. “Feel better?”
Dimitrios
inquired coolly.

Not about to admit he’d scared her so badly she almost fell back in the pool, she clutched the towel to her heaving breasts. “As a matter of fact, I do. Not,” she couldn’t help adding with unvarnished sarcasm, “that it’s any of your business.”

“When my fiancée disappears from my house without a word to anyone, I make it my business.”

“Really?” she drawled with feigned insouciance, and tried to slide past him. “You must have mistaken me for someone who cares.”

But he was faster, stronger and more merciless. He lunged forward, lethal as a tiger on its prey, and grabbed her squarely by the shoulders. He was, she realized belatedly, very angry.

“This is not how we settle our differences, Brianna,” he informed her. “If I say or do something you don’t like, you set me straight. You do not cut and run, ever again. Do you understand?”

Incensed, she spat, “Get your hands off me!”

“Make me,” he said, his voice deadly, and plastering her wet, scantily-clad body against him, he snagged her dripping hair in one hand, yanked her head back and kissed her, his mouth open, searching. Demanding and taking.

He tasted of rich, mellow
Metaxa
and frustration. Unbearably erotic and dangerously intoxicating.

Hopelessly enmeshed in craving, she drank him in.

Some distant part of her brain that was still functioning told her she was flirting with disaster, and urged her to extricate herself from a situation fast spiraling out of control. Attempting to heed it, she went to shove him away. But her knees were buckling, a tightness was building between her thighs, and her hands had a mind of their own. They blundered inside his open shirt to rediscover the lovely, sculpted planes of his chest, the lean symmetry of his ribs. His skin was hot and smooth and irresistible.

The more she touched, the more she craved and the farther she strayed past the boundaries of self-preservation. She tested the washboard strength of his midriff—hard, powerful, just like the rest of him. An incorrigible demon of need made her whimper into his mouth.

She heard the sharp intake of his breath and knew she was lost; that in being too daring herself, she’d tacitly invited him to return the favor. His fingers skimmed the length of her torso to search out the sensitive triangle between her thigh and her hip. His thumb strayed inside the leg of her bikini. Circled insolently. Exquisitely. And found its quarry.

Against her will and every shred of common sense at her command, a spasm of tortured pleasure streaked through her. “I hate you,” she moaned, her legs falling slackly apart.

“I know,” he purred, and touched her again. “I hate you, too.”

Rampant desire consumed her. Her entire body contracted in a flood that made an utter mockery of any show of resistance she might have wanted to portray. She was so ready for him, so desperate to feel him skin to skin, heat to heat, that she tore at his shirt like a mad woman.

With a muffled growl, he swept her off her feet and carried her into the palm tree’s dense shadow which neither stars nor moon nor man-made light could penetrate. She heard the rustle and rasp of fabric and zipper as he shed his clothes. Modesty and self-preservation lost in the rapacious demands of a hunger at last acknowledged after too long a fast, she kicked off her bikini bottom, tugged loose the strings holding her top in place and flung it aside.

She reached for him, wanting to touch him as he’d touched her. Intimately, audaciously. She wanted to close her hand around him and hear him groan in an agony of pleasure. She wanted to punish him as he’d punished her and leave his control hanging by a thread, his flesh so tight and yearning for release that he begged for mercy. All this ran through her mind in a molten stream of desire.

But he was not to be so easily subjugated. Closing in on her, hot and naked, he cupped her breasts in his palms and grazed his teeth lightly over her nipples. Teasing and taunting them, with his lips and his tongue until, defeated, she uttered his name on a soft cry, and dissolved in a wash of ecstasy that robbed her of her remaining strength.

He caught her as she collapsed, eased her onto the soft grass and drove into her in one long, hot urgent thrust that sent her over the edge a second time. She clawed at his back. Sank her teeth into the curved muscle of his shoulder. Wrapped her long legs around his waist and clung to him—anything to anchor herself to him as the world tilted on its axis.

He muttered in her ear, Greek and English words jumbled together in graphic exposition of how often he’d imagined this moment, of what she was doing to him.

He called her darling and sweetheart, and told her she was the most beautiful woman on earth, and he the luckiest man.